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Setting Realistic Fitness Goals in 2025: How to Avoid Common Pitfalls

Every New Year’s eve comes with this sense of novelty and renewal that stirs our psychology to look for ways in which we can make ourselves as new as the calendar. This is a good thing, of course, we should take advantage of any force that drives us to become our ideal selves, and the custom of making up New Year’s resolutions is a great example of that. However, especially for women undergoing perimenopause, it’s not uncommon for us to overdo it in an attempt to compensate for our perceived faults and shortcomings without taking our changing energy levels, muscle recovery rate, and weight management needs into account. As a result, we are often left feeling overwhelmed, tired, and losing that initial inspiration, which is tragic. So, in order to help you avoid this common pitfall, we’ll be going through how you can set realistic fitness goals for yourself in 2025.

Understanding Hormonal Shifts

During perimenopause, your body undergoes a series of hormonal changes that change many facets of how it used to operate many of its inner functions. Estrogen goes down, causing hot flashes, tiredness, and weight gain. Likewise, a lowering of your progesterone levels might leave you feeling mentally distressed and cause liquid retention, bloating and other adverse effects. When it comes to fitness, this will affect you in three main ways:

  • Energy Levels: You might experience more fatigue than before. It’s essential to plan workouts around times of day when you feel most energized.
  • Muscle Mass and Bone Density: Hormonal changes can lead to muscle and bone loss, making strength training and weight-bearing exercises a priority.
  • Weight Management: A slower metabolism can make weight loss more challenging, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach to exercise and nutrition.

Setting SMART Fitness Goals

Okay, so now that we know what we’re dealing with, what can we do about it? A common strategy to make up achievable goals in any field is to use the SMART criteria. That’s short for:

  • Specific: Define what you want to achieve. Instead of saying, “I want to exercise more,” aim for something like, “I want to walk 30 minutes, five days a week.”
  • Measurable: Track your progress. Whether it’s tracking steps, workout durations, or reps, having tangible metrics keeps you motivated.
  • Achievable: Set goals that fit your current fitness level and lifestyle. Overcommitting can lead to burnout.
  • Relevant: Focus on activities that align with your health needs during perimenopause, such as strength training, yoga, or low-impact cardio.
  • Time-Bound: Give yourself a deadline to achieve milestones, such as improving flexibility within three months or increasing endurance by summer.

So, by following these criteria you should be able to set up a clear goal and eliminate a lot of the vagueness that so often makes us feel discouraged in achieving it. But we’re not out of the woods yet.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Having a clear and achievable goal is important, in fact it’s essential, but it’s not going to be enough unless you avoid habits that set you back, and those can be from not doing enough, but they can also come from doing too much. Here are some things to watch out for:

  1. Burnout from Overtraining: It’s tempting to adopt this kamikaze approach to training where you’re spending hours at the gym every day without rest to obtain fast results, but overtraining can lead to injury and fatigue, which will just make take a long break that’ll put you back at square one.  So remember to incorporate rest days and listen to your body.
  2. Ignoring Nutrition: Exercise is just one piece of the puzzle. In fact, it’s the easiest part. Fueling your body with nutrient-rich foods, adequate protein, and hydration support is what’s going to ensure your body recovers from training and gives you the results you want.
  3. Comparing Yourself to Others: Every woman’s perimenopause journey is different. Focus on improving your health from where you are right now everyday instead, and don’t worry about what other people are doing.
  4. Lack of Variety: Repeating the same workouts can lead to plateaus. Mix up your routine with strength training, Pilates, swimming, or even dance classes to keep it fun and effective.

A Gentle Reminder

Your fitness journey is not about becoming perfect, but rather about becoming better, and that makes all the difference in the world. If you focus too much on chasing some ideal of perfection, you’ll become blind to the little victories and lose your motivation. 

So, after you set up your fitness goal for 2025 and run it through the SMART criteria, don’t forget that getting there is a matter of small everyday choices and that those deserve to be celebrated as well. And, if you’d like some help in reaching your goals and keeping yourself consistent, you can count on Kylie Larson’s 8-week Nutrition and Lifestyle Coaching program that’ll guide you through each step of your fitness journey, not with a focus on losing weight, but on educating yourself. You can learn more about it on her website: https://www.thekylielarson.com/ .

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